1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an ink-jet head and a manufacturing method thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
The ink-jet printer can perform printing by converting an electrical signal into a physical force and ejecting ink droplets through a nozzle. The ink-jet head can be manufactured by processing various components such as a chamber, a restrictor, a nozzle, a piezoelectric member, etc., on each corresponding layer and bonding the layers together.
Recently, the ink-jet head is increasingly used not only in the conventional graphic ink-jet industry for printing on the paper and fiber but also in the manufacture of electronic components, for example, a printed substrate and an LCD panel.
As a result, the ink-jet printing technology for an electronic component, which requires more accurate and precise discharge of functional ink than the conventional graphic printing, requires functions that have not been required for the conventional ink-jet head. Besides the basic requirement for the reduced size of the discharged ink droplet and reduced ink droplet speed variation, high density nozzles and high-frequency properties are required. In order to satisfy such requirement, thinner actuators of the ink-jet head needed to be developed.
FIG. 1 is a front cross-sectional view showing an ink-jet head 12 according to a conventional technology. As shown in FIG. 1, in the past, after bonding a piezoelectric member to one surface of the ink-jet head, a dicing process was performed in order to actuate the piezoelectric member as an independent actuator 2 on each chamber 6.
Here, if each actuator 2 is severed completely, a body of the ink-jet head as well as a membrane 5 may be seriously stressed. If not severed completely due to such a problem, as shown in FIG. 1, the lower part of the piezoelectric member is not completely separated and there remains a residual 3. As a result, adjacent actuators 2 are linked with one another, causing crosstalk.
Moreover, if the dicing process is performed twice by using a thin saw blade due to the consideration of stress on the silicon body of the ink-jet head, there remains a wall-shaped residual 8 of the piezoelectric member between adjacent actuators, causing crosstalk.